Conventional storage technologies (floating gate memories such as flash and DRAM) are based on the storage of charges in inorganic, silicon-based materials. These technologies for storing electric charges will reach their scaling limits within the near future. Thus, there is increased research for alternative methods for storing information. Herein, the principle of resistive memories based on the bistable resistance change in metal oxide nanoparticles has proven to be promising.
However, with conventional methods for manufacturing resistively switching metal oxide storage materials, active memory cells of few nanometers in dimension are unattainable. The currently used technologies for the deposition of the micro-crystalline storage substance are conventional thin-film techniques, such as vapor deposition or sputtering followed by the oxidation of the metal films (J. F. Gibbons and W. E. Beadle, Solid-State Electron., 7, 785 (1964); W. R. Hiatt and T. W. Hickmott, Appl. Phys. Lett., 6, 106 (1965) and F. Argall, Solid-State Electron., 11, 535 (1968)). During the deposition, induced inner mechanical stress, which may partly be considerably high, may occur in the layers. In addition, this stress may be increased by inhomogeneous heating of a larger layer volume due to the thermistor effect, so that the adhesiveness of the layers often limits the switching cycles, and the layers may peel off (S. Seo, M. J. Lee, D. H. Seo, E. J. Jeoung, D.-S. Suh, Y. S. Joung, I. K. Yoo, I. R. Hwang, S. H. Kim, I. S. Gyun, J.-S. Kim, J. S. Choi and B. H. Park, Appl. Phys. Lett., 85, 5655 (2004) and S. Seo, M. J. Lee, S. K. Choi, D. S. Suh, Y. S. Joung, I. K. Yoo, I. S. Buyn, I. R. Hwang, S. H. Kim, B. H. Park, Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 86 (2005), S. 093509). Up to now, bistable switching in nickel oxide has been observed only in connection with chemical conversion or chemical reactions of the oxide material in a narrow filament, wherein the layer was destroyed after a limited number of cycles.
Furthermore, a high storage density cannot be realized with this technology, since a reduction in size is difficult.
The mechanisms for monostable or temporally limited bistable switching are based on isolator breakdown and thermistor effects coupled with the diffusion of contact material into the memory cell and thus allow only a small number of switching cycles. This severely limits the lifetime.